VIDA: Strange, right here, and I knew nothing about it. And then some Dutch ethnologist comes and tells us all about our customs … These tobelias, women‑men … “Tobelias are girls in families without male descendants, who promise their parents not to marry. They take over the position and role of a non-existent son, and promise to take care of their parents.” You knew nothing about this either?

ANA: No.

VIDA: “A girl who wows to become tobelia gains a respectable position among men. She dresses like a man, behaves like a man, carries a weapon and participates in combats. Just the same as a man, the head of the family, pater familias.” This is how it once was, my dear. Back in the day, they knew what order was.

About women who overly loved the [same] man who is gone …

Choreographer Rosana Hribar and the co‑creators, Urša Rupnik and Maša Kagao Knez, explored the motif of the ancient custom of tobelias, women in a highly patriarchal [Balkan] society who, once the men were gone for various reasons, assumed their role. They drew on the emotion of “life without a man”, which belongs to both the present and the past.

A story intertwined with a loss of a loved one could be happening anywhere today; it is an urban tragedy about three women across two generations, marked by the tragic loss of their loved one – either son (Vida: Rosana Hribar), brother (Ana: Urša Rupnik), or husband (Bojana: Maša Kagao Knez) – who are thereafter destined to live with one another and the absent man, with whom each of them had been intimately connected.

The dance­ performance Tobeliais based on timeless motifs that appear in the wish and desire “to belong” on the one hand, and in the entrapment in the environment, hopeless situation, passion and anger, mourning and yearning, contempt and fateful intertwining, and condemnation to eternal returning to the past on the other. The man had died. What remains is the grave and a sense of loss, neglect, and bitterness, fueled mainly by fear of everything that questions firm beliefs.

Tobelia is an image of the world in which values and ideals are changing rapidly, while the question of women’s emancipation is becoming increasingly important – both in light of the loss of the rights (already) acquired, and the changing identity of the (absent) men. Tobelia is a rearview mirror of the broken identities of humanity, an image of the devastating patriarchy of the world.